🏃➡️🏃➡️ From crazy busy to crazy busy …
On a (somewhat empty) flight to TCEA in San Antonio, Texas.
Last week, during the Snowpocalypse, school was canceled Monday through Thursday. We had probably 8-10” of snow where I live. We had e-learning, though, so we won’t have to make up the days. Three of those days were synchronous e-learning where high school teachers met their students for 20 minutes per class period on videoconference. I was surprisingly pleased with it — as a temporary option.
I have missed a LOT of school due to teacher workshops and conferences out-of-state (with the blessing of my school admins, thankfully). I was hopeful that this week I’d be in-class, face-to-face with my students. Home, yes … but at my home seeing them virtually.
Now, I’m on my way to the TCEA Conference in San Antonio, Texas! It’ll be warmer than the 17*F it was when I left home on Sunday … but it won’t be what I’d consider “warm!” No complaints. Either way, I’ll get to see lots of great folks at the conference. If you won’t be there, don’t worry … I’ll share slides, session video, and other resources when I get home.
My schedule for TCEA in San Antonio, Texas!
Part of my sub plans while I’m gone: Blooket games. My students LOVE them. (Do you know about Blooket? Here’s our explainer article about it.)
I have found that they’re REALLY easy to make when you use an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
In today’s 💡 Big Idea, I share how I make new Blooket games in MINUTES using AI. (It’s easy. You can do it, too!)
Inside:
⏳ Create complete units in minutes. Keep everything you make.
👀 DTT Digest: 4 resources worth checking out
🗄 Template: Winter Olympics explore board
💡 The Big Idea: How I make Blooket review games in 2 minutes
😄 Smile of the day: Papers to grade …
👋 How we can help
⏳Create complete units in minutes. Keep everything you make.
Sunday planning sessions shouldn't take your entire weekend.
TeachAid generates full curriculum units aligned to standards and adapted to your classroom. Lessons, activities, assessments, scaffolds, and supports. Ready to teach, easy to customize. What used to take hours now takes minutes.
Over 23,000 teachers are using it to reclaim their time while improving quality.
School leaders: Get a free pilot for your team. We handle setup, onboarding and personalizing at no cost.
👀 DTT Digest
4 teaching resources worth checking out today
♥️ February Activity Journal — This book from Book Creator is packed with activities for every day of the month!
🤵🏿♂️ Classroom resources for Black History Month — Commemorate Black History Month with resources from PBS covering topics ranging from civil rights events to discussions about race in current events.
🤯 Get hundreds of FREE lessons! — Our “how to” video walks you through finding free lessons from TheAchievery.com. Learn more in our post 35+ engaging lessons you can use in class tomorrow.
ICYMI 📱 NEW LinkedIn Profile Template — This template serves as a dynamic LinkedIn "sandbox" that allows students to draft and refine their professional digital presence in a low-stakes, offline environment.
🗄 TEMPLATE 🗄
⛷️ Check out this Winter Olympics explore board!
Looking for an easy way to explore the world’s biggest winter sports competition while infusing student choice? Check out this Winter Olympics Explore Board.
Explore boards are designed to support a variety of learning styles, integrating content delivery with critical thinking. By providing a "menu" of options, you empower students to take ownership of their learning journey.
The Winter Olympics Explore Board is a single, interactive hub packed with engaging videos, articles, and hands-on activities. From the ancient origins of the games to the modern physics of the slopes, students will dive into:
The Science and Math behind elite athletic performance.
Creative "Apply" Tasks like designing athlete trading cards or creating animations.
STEM & Art Extensions that challenge students to build their own games or master the iconic Olympic rings.
This explore board is ready to share with your class as-is, or you can make a copy and customize it for your specific grade level. It’s the perfect tool for integrating social studies, science, and physical education into your winter curriculum.
Note: Sometimes the virtualescaperooms.org website gets overloaded with requests. If you get an error just wait an hour or two and try again.
💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡
⏰ How I make Blooket review games in 2 minutes
In a matter of minutes, I can have a custom online review game for my students.
When it’s time to review vocabulary or practice new material, my students always request Blooket (blooket.com).
(I almost wrote that they “beg” for Blooket, but let’s be honest … my high schoolers rarely beg for anything — especially something they’ll have to use to study!)
If you’re familiar with online review games like Kahoot!, Wayground (formerly Quizizz), Quizlet Live, and Gimkit, Blooket fits in nicely with them. It’s completely free, and my students like the different game modes.
In the past, I have run into a problem with using these online review games on a regular basis …
Making new online review games can be a pain
If you go to the review game’s website and create questions one by one, it can take forever. It takes lots of clicking and typing, clicking and typing. It’s pretty inefficient.
Plus, in the past, I’ve had moments where I sit at the screen and run out of good ideas for questions.
AI has changed all of that. It’s easier than ever to generate questions with an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and others.
In fact, I’ve started using them to generate lots and lots of questions for review games for my students.
Why I use Blooket a lot these days
I’m a fan of Blooket, for one, because it’s free.
My students seem to like the games that they can play. There’s lots of variety, and they are like some of the games my students like to play online already.
They can customize their “Blooks” (their avatars / characters).
If you want to learn more about Blooket — including tips and ideas for using it — check out our post: Blooket: A game-changer for engaging students in the classroom
How I make Blooket games in 2 minutes
Seriously … sometimes I make these games in the moments before school starts. Once you get the hang of it, it goes really fast.
Below is my six-step process. (It looks like a lot, but I provide lots of little notes and tips. It’s really just: use AI to make questions, format them in a table, get Blooket’s spreadsheet template, and paste them into it. You’ll see.)
1. Go to your AI assistant.
I have personally used both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to do this. You could also use Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, etc.
NOTE: If you have a school Google or Microsoft account, your account will have the kind of data privacy where whatever you type won’t train the AI model. (If you have ChatGPT for Teachers, it appears to offer that, too.)
2. Upload the content your students have been learning.
For me, as a high school Spanish teacher (who doesn’t use textbooks), it’s a two-page document I’ve created with all of the vocabulary words and grammar concepts we’ll be covering. If you have digital documents of what your students are studying, you can upload those.
NOTE: If you don’t have a digital file (or PDF) of your material — like if you’re using a physical textbook — you can always scan it and upload it. I use the Google Drive mobile app. There’s an icon of a camera, and it’ll let you scan multiple pages in the same file before saving it as a PDF that you can use. I’ve also used a mobile app called TinyScanner. (Warning: There are probably copyright implications in this. If you’re worried about that, don’t use this idea.)
3. Type your prompt.
I personally like the RACE prompting framework: Role, Action, Context, Expectations. I tell it my role (high school Spanish teacher). I tell it what action to do (create multiple-choice questions based on the material I uploaded). I give it any context (use basic Spanish, create more questions on stem-changing verbs, etc.). And I give it my expectations (formatting … see next step for this).
Here’s an example prompt that I’ve used that got me the results I wanted. (Important: Don’t leave out the part where you ask it to format it as a table!)
Below is a new vocabulary list for my spanish class. can you create 60 multiple choice questions where the question is just the spanish term ... and there are four possible answers (with one correct answer) and the possible answers are plausible? for the correct answer columns, the headings should be answer 1, answer 2, answer 3, and answer 4. Format it in a table where the first column is the question, the next four columns are the possible answers, the sixth column is just the number 15, and the final column is the number of the correct answer (according to the number in the heading). Make it so the correct answers are an even mix of 1, 2, 3 and 4.
NOTE about creating questions: You can use AI to generate a large amount of questions. However, there are limits to how many questions it can generate effectively at one time. If I want to create 100 questions, I’ll tell it that I want 100 questions but for it to create 25 of them at a time. Then, later, in the copy/paste step, you’ll just copy each group of 25 over to the spreadsheet. (If you’re not sure how to do this, just ask the AI assistant: “I you to want to make X questions. Should we break it up into smaller groups for you to be able to do your best work?”)
NOTE about customizing the time per question: I just specified that the sixth column should be 15 — providing 15 seconds per question. You can adjust that in the prompt if you want — or once you’ve copied it over to a spreadsheet, you can always adjust it.
NOTE: At the end of this process, when you are getting the results that you need/want, you can turn this into a custom GPT / Gem (saved set of instructions the AI uses every time). That way, you don’t have to write out the instructions the same way every time. (Here’s a post I write about creating Gems in Google Gemini to do this.)
4. Download the Blooket spreadsheet template.
Click the “Create” button to make a new game. We’re going to use the CSV import feature of Blooket to create a new game. (See the “CSV import” button in the image below.)
See the CSV import button. Click it to use this method for creating games.
Basically, when you do this, it’ll let you download a spreadsheet template from Blooket. Here’s what it looks like:
The spreadsheet Blooket uses to create questions in bulk.
The spreadsheet is formatted in this way:
Column B: The question text
Column C: Answer 1 (one of your multiple choice answers)
Column D: Answer 2
Column E: Answer 3
Column F: Answer 4
Column G: Time limit (in seconds, just the number)
Column H: Correct answer (just the number of the right answer)
In the spreadsheet, they give you a couple examples so you can see how it works.
(By the way, Blooket isn’t the only app that allows you to create lots of questions all at once with a spreadsheet. Once you know about this, you’ll be able to use these method for any of them!)
5. Copy the questions from the AI assistant into the spreadsheet.
You can have your AI assistant create a spreadsheet with your data … but I’ve found it just as quick and effective to highlight the text it generates in the table and copy/paste it into the Blooket spreadsheet template.
If given the choice in Excel, I like to choose the Paste option that says “match destination formatting” so it doesn’t bring over a different font. (See below.)
This is the “Paste” option I choose in Excel: keep destination formatting.
If you’ve created questions in multiple sections (see above), just keep copying and pasting them over.
6. Save it as a CSV file and upload to Blooket.
This is easy. Once your questions — and answers and everything else — are in place in the spreadsheet, just go to File > Save as … and choose CSV. It’ll save it as a file you can upload to Blooket. Once you’ve uploaded the file to Blooket, just check that everything looks right.
NOTE: I often use the UTF-8 option for my CSV files because I’m using accented characters in Spanish. I’ve found that a standard CSV doesn’t preserve those accented characters well, but the UTF-8 does.
You’re done! A few quick notes …
Once you’ve created your Blooket game, you can run it as a live in-class game OR assign it for “homework” (student-led individual practice).
My students seem to love the following games the most (in this order):
Fishing Frenzy
Deceptive Dinos
Crypto Hack
Battle Royale
Tower Defense 2
Want to learn more about Blooket? Here’s our explainer article with tips for using it: Blooket: A game-changer for engaging students in the classroom
😄 Smile of the day
Is this you? Or do you refuse to bring grading home? (Or do you bring it home — but never actually do it?!?)
👋 How we can help
There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:
Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.
Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.
Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!
